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Abstract

We studied a collection of 32 publicly published guidelines for designing RESTful
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), each from a different company, to
identify similarities and differences to see if there are overall best practices
across ten different topics. Our contribution includes providing a list of topics
that API authors can reference when creating or evaluating their own guidelines.
Additionally, we found that while some guidelines attempt to enforce consistency,
simplicity, and intuitiveness in the APIs that use these guidelines,
cross-guideline comparisons show a lack of consistency in some of the topics
examined, and different interpretations of what is thought to be “simple” and
“intuitive.”